Your host and the house
Shona Maclellan welcomes you to her newly refurnished family croft at 42A Back.
She was brought up at 42B Back, opposite, but spent much of her childhood with her aunt and uncles in this traditional croft house, helping to look after the chickens, sheep and cattle they raised on their land.
Shona lives in a new house, ½ a mile away, built on another part of her family croft.
She works in the local secondary school, looking after children with special needs, and lives with her army officer husband Crawford, her 2 sons, Cameron and Robert, and 3 dogs: Sox, Toffee and Ted.
The croft house is a traditional poured-concrete “white house” design, built in 1948. Prior to its construction, Shona’s grandparents lived in a Hebridean “black house” -- a thatched cottage made of local stone and with a central fire burning peat.
New houses started to be built at the turn of the last century. These had chimneys, and so came to be known as white houses, no longer full of smoke and soot.
Several examples of maintained black houses are now visitor centres, with Arnol and Gearannan Blackhouse Village the best examples.
The house was completely refurbished in 2022.
